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I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

gavinhoward.com

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Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#121

Post by fileeditview »

sebstefan wrote: post #108
Const-me wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have spend that time learning something which is actually useful and helps finding interesting jobs. For example, GPU programming or SIMD intrinsics. What annoys me about rust is the complexity just for the sake of it, lots of pain for minimal gain compared to alternatives. If you need async/await you'll do better in modern .NET despite the GC, if you need the highest CPU performance you'll do better in C++…

"despite the GC" and "despite the unsafety" is really putting a lot of weight on that "despite" These are massive problems

That depends a lot on the domain of the code.. just saying they are massive problems is plain wrong. There is a huge percentage of applications that need not care about GC at all.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#123

Post by throwawaymaths »

jltsiren wrote: post #26
noelwelsh wrote: post #3

Rust is certainly not the last word in systems programming languages, but it's an huge leap forward from C and C++. To be honest, it's a sad reflection of our industry that it's taken this long to get basic safety + ML circa 1975 language features into this niche. If things had turned out a little bit different we could all have been using OCaml for the past few decades.

My favorite hypothesis here is that programming language enthusiasts are too different. They are incapable of convincing the average programmer of the merits of their favorite language, because their way of thinking is different. Arguments they find convincing are not convincing to the average programmer. Progress happens incrementally with small steps. Existing languages get new features. New languages get popular,…

> Existing languages get new features

That's how you wind up with C++

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#126

Post by throwawaymaths »

GuB-42 wrote: post #69

People complaining about Rust... As Bjarne Stroustrup says: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses" This is actually the kind signal I wanted to see. A language everyone likes isn't right. In production, programmers have to follow customer requirements, not the other way around, and customers don't care about your pretty code, they want their things to work, an…

Worse is better in programming languages. You decide "I'll use python because everyone else uses it" and then you waste a week of your life debugging when some asshole on your team has mutated a dict that you passed into a critical function and you didn't notice.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#127

Post by K0nserv »

mmaniac wrote: post #67

A lot of this author's complaints about Rust remind me of similar historical complaints about C++, but amplified. Hijacking and overtaking new projects? C++ and Rust both do that. C++'s compile times were a joke, Rust is even worse. Complex semantics and syntax? Both have those. Rust is trying to be everything to everyone? C++ has always been criticised as design by committee. And yet C still exists and is widely use…

What are some examples of the complex semantics? The things I can think of(lifetimes, generics, traits) exist and are modelled in C too, but just with less(or no) support from the language and compiler.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#128

Post by anonymoushn »

sebstefan wrote: post #108
Const-me wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have spend that time learning something which is actually useful and helps finding interesting jobs. For example, GPU programming or SIMD intrinsics. What annoys me about rust is the complexity just for the sake of it, lots of pain for minimal gain compared to alternatives. If you need async/await you'll do better in modern .NET despite the GC, if you need the highest CPU performance you'll do better in C++…

"despite the GC" and "despite the unsafety" is really putting a lot of weight on that "despite" These are massive problems

I don't think it's so cut and dry. For lots of usecases, using Rust involves writing everything from scratch, because the only libraries available pull in an opinionated async runtime and feel entitled to call the global allocator and various syscalls at times the user cannot control, and these components cannot be swapped out because of fundamental issues that prevent Rust libraries from being composable (unless they go out of their way to adopt a feature that launched late last year?). IME there are relatively few usecases where long stalls due to GC are bad but long stalls due to page faults or open(2) taking a couple seconds to return are fine.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#129

Post by kosolam »

bayindirh wrote: post #97
tormeh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone believes there will be no C++ codebases in the future - that's crazy talk. What could happen in a decade or two is that there'll be no _new_ C++ codebases. Popular languages are retired to legacy status from time to time, and C++ is completely outclassed by Rust.

People love to think that C++ is only used in systems programming, the thing is C++ is used everywhere . FORTRAN is being developed and improved, and new code, most notably in scientific domain, is still being written. What Rust did to C++ is what clang did to GCC. Wake the giant up. Rust will go nowhere, but it's the same for C++. Thinking that C++ will just fade to black is wishful thinking.

Since C++ still evolves and changes, I guess greenfield C++ projects in the future can limit themselves to a subset of the newer improved language thereby C++ will continue living by that way as well.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#130

Post by opheliate »

@gavinhoward Just FYI, a couple of links in the article are broken:

* The "incomplete list" of C UB currently points to the Rust spec vision

* The link labelled "unreasonable programming language" currently points to the Gentoo Wikipedia page

* The "Starship" link points to the House Wiki page on Vicodin

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